Hacker News Reader

Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

Certainly to stop people with US businesses from doing business with Iran or Cuba. To stop an American owned British company from doing business in the UK? To stop a French company doing business in France? To stop either doing business with the rest of the world? To stop anyone doing business with China?

Its really not comparable.

View on HN

They absolutely can impose sanctions on foreign companies by restricting their access to US markets, investments and penalizing US banks doing business with them.

For some EU companies this is irrelevant, but for global companies this becomes a problem.

So did they stop any Iranian companies doing business with Iran? Did they stop China or Russia doing business with Iran? If Google Deepmind has to stop doing business with non-US citizens what will they do with their R & D in the UK and other countries? Will Mistral stop doing business in France? Will the Chinese AI companies stop doing business with everyone else (including China?) to retain access to US markets and banking?

The likely end result of this is that it will shrink the market to which American companies have access by more than it will shrink the market for anyone else.

There is an example of this and you can probably dig deeper if you're truly curious instead of just assuming things.

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-forces-raid-ship-s...

I am not assuming anything. Military force is not the same thing as economic sanctions. Are you suggesting the US would be willing to use military force to stop the UK or France using technology developed in their own countries? Or from using Chinese LLMs? Otherwise this is irrelevant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com